Marketer 1: Bill Murray is stuck in time and ... Marketer 2: Stuck in time. OK. Put him inside a clock. Marketer 1: Literally inside the clock? Marketer 2: Yes, and obviously the clock has to be unrealistically oversized in order to fit him. But not all of him. Just his head. Meanwhile, Andie MacDowell is also there and doesn't give a shit that Bill is clearly pleading to be let out.

A derogatory term referring to the tendency in modern Film Posters and DVD cover art to have a black background with the faces of the lead actors above the name of the movie. Ubiquitous once the age of photo editing software came about, since it meant studios no longer had to commission an artist tens of thousands of dollars to paint a poster for them, when they could just take stock photos of the lead actor and have interns superimpose them onto black.

Generally felt to be a lazy approach, as it requires little in the way of creativity and imagination, and leads to many DVD releases looking all but indistinguishable on the shelf.

It is particularly bad when other publicity materials such as teaser posters have looked different and distinctive, but the final poster is floating heads so that potential audiences can see who stars in the film. Or even the theatrical posters have been distinctive, but the DVD art has the syndrome.

Examples:

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Comic Books

It's also quite common in comic books, particularly back in the 60's and 70's in team books, where they'd have one character doing something interesting in the middle and every other member of the team as just a floating head watching the action.

30s and 40s pulp comics tended to have a Dramatis Personae on the side of the cover, usually in the form of a strip of mug shots depicting characters from multiple stories that would appear in the books.

Countless movies from the Disney Animated Canon have at least one DVD or Blu-Ray case with this. The Lion King at least has an excuse with Mufasa, because he actually appeared as a floating head in-movie.

Some posters for A Hard Day's Night, including the ones the various AHDN album covers use.

After the distinctive use of logo without text for the 1989 film Batman, the marketing division apparently decided to embrace this trope. The primary posters and video covers for Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin all use this approach, with the first two using variants of the logo for their teaser posters. This got dumped when the series was rebooted.

The Dark Knightdid this◊ (there was also an individual poster for each face), though it at least pulls it off with some style.

While not technically "floating heads" per se, the DVDs of the James Bond films dumped the distinctive posters for shots of Bond with a Pistol Pose in front of the most memorable set from the film. Calling them prosaic would be an understatement. One can just tell that the marketing executives wanted to hide the age of the films by redoing all the covers (since the posters are all pretty indicative of their eras).

A slipcase edition of Independence Day was simply a flaming Earth with Will Smith's head floating above it. Thankfully, the actual cover remains the same.

Lampshaded in dialogue by The Mist: after a thunderstorm demolishes the main character's studio, destroying the (amazing) movie artwork he had been painting, he laments that the studio will just opt for "some floating heads" instead of extending his deadline.

Which still got a floating head poster in the form of a floating head Leatherface (with a green tint).

The cover of the Silent Hill movie features the floating head of Sharon Da Silva.

Utilized in this poster◊ from the original release of Mary Poppins, which in contrast to later home video covers, emphasizes the flashy musical aspects over the fantasy aspects. This Syndrome was also utilized on DVD covers from 1998◊ and 2009◊.

The DVD version of Deadfall features the floating heads of Michael Biehn, Nicolas Cage, and Sarah Trigger. There's a minor case of Covers Always Lie to boot: Presumably for the sake of keeping him recognizable, the Cage head is a more recent, clean shaven photo. However, in the film itself, Cage has a mustache and spends most of the time wearing sunglasses.

Saving Private Ryan, oh god, Saving Private Ryan. Particularly when you look at the classy earlier posters with just the soldier silhouette.

X-Men: First Class came under fire for its teaser posters featuring floating heads of James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender floating (right near the respective crotches) of a silhouette of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen respectively.

One of the posters for the Miley Cyrus romance movie The Last Song might just contain the most literal example ever of Floating Head Syndrome. Liam's Hemsworth's face is shown in profile, framed against the sun, with his neck cut off at the base of his jaw and skull, making it absolutely nothing but a floating decapitated head.

All of the movies in the Vault Disney collection of DVDs. The Pollyanna cover looks especially bad, with the protagonist's giant head appearing in the sky above a normal-sized Pollyanna.

The Japanese poster of The Avengers features the team in civilian clothing, with pictures of them in crime fighting garb from the torso up floating above them.

The Superman special edition DVD has this, along with the "deluxe editions" of the third and fourth movies. The second film's special edition DVD averted this by showing Superman flying instead of his floating head.

When the Doctor Who New Adventures started, there was no requirement for the cover to literally depict a scene from the book, and the cover from the first book in the series included the Doctor's head floating in midair. Years later, when the last book was being written, there was a thought that it should have a similar cover. Since it was now the convention that the cover should depict a scene from the book, the author added a sequence where the Doctor's Huge Holographic Head appeared over London. Then that scene wasn't used for the cover after all.

The Doctor Who Novelisations often had the Doctor's floating head, especially on covers by Chris Achilleos who traditionally did the heads in monochrome and the rest of the picture in colour. See some examples here.

All three books of The Flight Engineer feature co-author James Doohan's head. Which is rather odd considering that the character who's most like Scotty isn't the hero. The third book adds the head of a Fibian.

No live actors represented, but the cover◊ to Galaxy of Fear: Ghost of the Jedi has floating heads of Darth Vader and Aiden Bok in the background. Bok might be understandable, as he's the eponymous ghost, but Vader?

This was a common cover design for almost all of the Star Trek novels of the nineties.

The original paperback cover for Return of the Living Dead had a giant disembodied zombie head and hands looming behind a woman in a black void, seemingly about to grab her. Overlaps with Evil Overlooker, what with the zombies being the villains and all.

Live-Action TV

One of the boxes of SmallvilleDVDs only has the faces of Clark, Lana and Lex on it.

When serials from the classic Doctor Who series were released on VHS in the 1990s, most of them had beautiful paintings commissioned specially for them. After 1997, this stopped.

The cover◊ of the Limited Edition of the Series 6 boxset consists of only a giant floating Silent head in a pitch black background. (For the sake of contrast, the regular edition's cover is a non-beheaded group shot◊.)

Angel: Up to Eleven on the British DVD boxsets, where the covers tend to be floating busts but every single disc has a floating Angel head. All doing the same "Am I brooding or did I leave the iron on?" face, but separate images. You'd guess the camera team got drunk and did a giant photoshoot of this one expression at different angles, then realized they had to do something with it.

The SonyBewitchedDVDs had covers that each showed large versions of Samantha, Darrin, and Endora (and in later seasons, Sam's and Darrin's children as well) looming above a cartoonish city, usually cut off from either the torso up, or the shoulders up. The box for Sony's DVD of the complete series instead had a full-body shot of Sam's Animated Credits Opening self as its focal image, but did have little bordered pictures of actors' heads on the bottom.

Music

With The Beatles has the four band members' faces half-lit in darkness, with Ringo just below the other three.

More than one of Michael Bolton's albums qualifies, including Time, Love, and Tenderness.

Scorpions: The original album cover of Taken by Force featured the band in a cemetery, but it was replaced by a black background with stock photos of the band.

Yahtzee writes on the subject on this Extra Punctuation, touching on Heavy Rain, Ico, Another World and others, as part of a column bemoaning how American cover art is almost invariably of poorer quality than its international equivalents.

Metroid: Other M has a cover with the heads of Samus and Adam, along with young Samus in almost full-body profile.

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